"cavelamb himself" wrote in message
...
RMDumse wrote:

On Oct 21, 4:47 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

There's an inconvenient truth for ya', huh?


Or an convenient lie.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...s.37a0d0d.html

"Until this week, it seemed likely that Dallas would remain No. 1. But
the Police Department has discovered it hasn't been following FBI
guidelines, resulting in the overreporting of certain crimes.

"In some cases, the rules allow multiple crimes to be reported as a
single act. For example, 10 car break-ins committed by the same
burglar within a few minutes of one another count as one criminal act.
Dallas was reporting 10 crimes."

Or maybe not. It could be just NYC is better at covering up its
statistics than Dallas is. However, I know for a fact Dallas tries to
do the same, at least in one case I've already sighted.

Randy


Dunno where these numbers came from, so I'll offer up some more...

Dallas Crime stats:
http://www.ci.dallas.tx.us/dpd/stat_decision.htm
http://dallas.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm

The statistics I've quoted, and to which the two newspaper articles in
question refer to, are the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which are
well-defined an monitored by the FBI to a fairly good extent. They're
compiled from state reports. In recent years, a lot of progress has been
made in getting consistent and uniform reporting from the states, and
particularly from larger cities.


MISreporting statistics???
It's a real problem.
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/HRWG/PDF/hrwg03.pdf

No, it's not. Not in the US. That report is about international comparisons
of crime reports. Those are pretty much fouled up, and always have been.

Here's a suggestion from someone who was immersed, and I mean up to my
eyeballs, in these statistics for about four years: Don't jump to
conclusions about them. A lot more is known about these numbers than you can
comprehend from a couple of weekends spent with the UCR. The people who
compile them are not dummies.

The FBI doesn't report as much detail as we might expect because they know
where the question marks are in the fine details. As for what they report,
you can use it, with some caution, to uncover many patterns of crime in the
US. That's what they're for. They're not intended to be used for fodder in a
debate. They're intended to provide information for people who make policy
decisions about crime, not to give real estate agents or NG debaters fuel
for their arguments. If they're used intelligently they can tell you a lot.

When a Dallas reporter gets excited that they may be able to claim that
Dallas in not #1 in crime, but maybe #2, you know that the reporter is
misusing the stats. Likewise, when someone says that a minute fractional
adjustment in the numbers brings into question the 6:1 relationship between
burglaries in NYC vs. Dallas, the someone is misusing the stats. Minute
adjustments do not change the qualitative relationship when the numerical
relationship is 6:1. That's just denial and intentional obfuscation, trying
to make something appear that isn't there.

--
Ed Huntress